Bøker av Richard C. Thornton

History of the U.S.- Soviet relations during the first term of Ronald Reagan, during which the president defeated the Soviet drive for strategic weapons superiority, regional hegemony, and control over Middle Eastern oil.

The point of departure for distinguished historian Richard C. Thornton's insightful new assessment of the Reagan administration is Reagan's overwhelming re-election in 1984. His first-term policies had placed the United States in the ascendancy over the Soviet Union, and he sought to capitalize on that success by bringing the Cold War to an end on favorable terms. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, proved increasingly unable to bear the costs of supporting its empire and client state and adopted a strategy of detente. Its new leader Mikhail Gorbachev personified the new stance, and his rise to power in 1985 galvanized the U.S. administration's detente faction in renewed opposition to Reagan's strategy and advocacy of accommodation with Moscow.

Spain's American empire began as the serendipitous outgrowth of the search for a shortcut to China. That search derived from two mid-fifteenth-century developments: the Ming Dynasty's decision to adopt a silver standard for its medium of exchange and the Ottoman Turks' capture of Constantinople in 1453.

Odd Man Out is a novel assessment of the motives and strategies of Harry Truman, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong as they struggled to maneuver their countries into positions of advantage in the postwar world. Their successes and failures resulted in the catastrophic event that globalized the Cold War ---the Korean War.